This is a little snipped i've been using to redirect a custom page to it's first child. It extends the init method of the Controller. This has proven useful in cases where the client wants to re-sort the child pages and doesn't want to mess around the configuration of a redirector page.

In this tutorial we'll be taking a look at SilverStripes nested controller concept and how you can use it in your own projects. Keep in mind though that this tutorial is probably for the more advanced users and for those who whish to learn abit more about how SilverStripe works. I will be referencing Controllers Instead of Pages by Ty Barho and the nested controller we'll be building will be for handling his scenario.

I have also taken the liberty of including a zip file which contains all the code examples from Tys tutorial + the new controller and the new URL rule for it.

SilverStripe is great for working with Pages in the CMS. But what if you need functionality without the need for content or all the "data fluff," like in Aram's tutorial about user registration and profile editing. Well, believe it or not, SilverStripe is a pretty solid MVC platform, even if you're working outside of the page data objects. It took me a while to understand how to implement true-ish MVC in SilverStripe, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share.

We now know the basics of using DataObjects as Pages from Part 1 of this tutorial. In part 2, we are now going to look at taking this further and creating a basic product catalogue with products that are DataObjects managed via the ModelAdmin interface. This tutorial will also serve as an introduction to ModelAdmin it self, which is an extremely powerful CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) manager for any type of DataObject, whether used as pages or not.

In this two part tutorial, I am going to show you how to display DataObjects as if they were pages. This is often very useful for times when you have lots of items that don't warrant full site tree objects, but do need to be displayed on their own on the site. In this first part displaying Staff Members we are going to keep it simple, using a Data Object Manager to manage our Staff Members and referring to their ID in the URL. Later in part 2, we will see how to use ModelAdmin to manage a Search Engine friendly product catalogue.

When I develop SilverStripe sites, I usually get functionality working in the default theme blackcandy before getting it working in the final templates. This way, authors can start adding content and seeing how it looks on the page, and I can get early feedback about the functionality. Also, as a developer I get to see real content in the browser early in the process. So does the designer.